Wednesday, 29 July 2015

Ari Thor Arason is a
trainee policeman who on an impulse accepts a posting in
Siglufjordur, in the far north of Iceland. He leaves his medical
student girlfriend behind in Reykjavik, and arrives in the small and
isolated village, once busy with the fishing industry but now just a
sleepy bywater, where he is told 'nothing ever happens'. Of course,
within weeks there are two corpses – one a famous writer found dead
at the foot of the stairs of the local theatre on the eve of an
amateur production, the other a woman living with the man playing the
lead in that production, discovered almost naked, bleeding red into
the newly-fallen snow.

Ragnar Jonasson's novel
is very much a traditional murder mystery, closer to Yrsa Sigurdardottir than
Arnaldur Indridason, which gains much from the isolated setting, in
which a whole town is trapped, in effect, by the snow. Amateur
dramatics and murder in an isolated setting make it sound very Agatha
Christie, but as with Sigurdardottir it's the nature of the people in
their isolated society, a world of extremes of light and darkness,
that perhaps makes difficult the shadings of gray. It's a tangled
web, with each character's back story suggesting more knots, and the
past is woven deeply into it: thefts and murders, abuses and illicit
loves: sometimes it seems as if no one in this Icelandic milieu
possesses a life free of serious damage. And that includes Ari Thor,
whose relationship with his girlfriend seems unlikely to survive the
great distance, both real and metaphoric, between them.

Ari Thor is an oddly
unfinished character, which may suit his relatively naiveté, but it
stands in sharp contrast to the more telling bits of exposition the
various suspects and victims receive. There's a fascinating dynamic
between him and his boss, Tomas, whose live and let live
attitude sometimes seems to take on a more sinister connotation, and
sometimes seems almost comic: casting him in the film version is an
amusing exercise.

In some ways, because
Ari Thor 'solves' both deaths, but doesn't get a full measure of
justice, this becomes the story of his adjustment to a world much
different from the 'big city' of Reykjavik; an adjustment which was
at the heart of Indridason's Erlendur series too. The novel's end leaves
that story unfinished....

Thursday, 23 July 2015

I was on BBC Radio4
Front Row yesterday, discussing E.L. Doctorow with Samira Ahmed.
Although I was saddened by his death, it was a privilege to be able
to convey some of my enthusiasm for his work, and for him as a
person, to a wider audience. You can link to that broadcast here; our segment starts about 16 minutes in, but really it's worth listening right through from the start, it's that good a programme.

Doctorow's work is
always about relations of power—whether class, financial, racial,
physical or whatever, and how the imbalance of those relations is at
the core of the American experience, if not the core of the American
Dream. It is always about the problems of America, the way those at
the bottom experience the City on A Hill. It's easy to miss, because
the stories themselves are so engrossing, the characters so well
drawn: his historical figures blend with his invented ones,
reinforcing his insistence that he was not writing historical
fiction. Take The March, published when he was 74. It's as
good a Civil War novel as anyone had written in a long time, but at
heart it's about the way, even before the war was over, the
rebellious southerners were being welcomed back into the fold, and
the newly 'freed' slaves were being found a status not much different
from slavery.

I met Doctorow once,
at a debate organised by the New Yorker (with whom I was on good
terms at the time, though never good enough to sell them anything)
and the Sunday Telegraph at Cheltenham Ladies College, probably about
25 years ago. I was standing by myself at the pre-debate reception,
and two guys standing next to me drew me into their conversation.
'Hi, I'm Joe, this is Ed,' one of them said, and a few seconds later
I dissolved into fan boy status as I realised I was talking to Joe
Heller and Ed Doctorow. It was one of the finest half-hours I've ever
spent: the discussion never got near literary gossip; it covered real
topics, and had mobile phones been invented I would even now be
bombarding you with selfies.

Doctorow was maybe
the last of the politically involved novelists from the time writers
of fiction (and excellent non-fiction) were considered important
pundits, rather than retreating to academia and ceding the high ground to the screeching beltway hacks who now populate
the airways and leech into print. He was younger than Vonnegut,
Mailer, or Vidal, but like them he accepted a public presence. He and
his Kenyon classmate Paul Newman helped keep the Nation, America's
pre-eminent left-wing weekly, afloat for years, and Doctorow
contributed many fine essays to it. And like Mailer, and Roth (who is
two years younger) he may the last of that generation of novelists
educated in New York's public schools and then WASPy private
colleges. I mentioned on Front Row that Doctorow's academic career
reads like a character from a Philip Roth novel (Marcus, from
Indignation, actually).

What was important
from Doctorow's time at Kenyon was his study with John Crowe Ransom,
one of the godfathers of 'New Criticism'. There's an interesting
essay to be written about how New Criticism's analysis of Modernism
helped generate Post-Modernism. Mailer and Vidal followed the
modernist greats, with Vidal picking up a post-modern sort of irony;
but Vonnegut and, with less flash but more variety, Doctorow, clearly
embraced a post-modern sense of narrative. I mentioned how Doctorow's
narrative strategies changed with each book: Loon Lake,
perhaps the most extreme example, might be compared with John Hawkes.

But it was
Doctorow's sense of history that inevitably defines his writing. John
Updike hated Ragtime, saying Doctorow was 'playing with
helpless dead puppets...in a gravity-free faintly sadistic game'. But
I can't think of a writer less sadistic to his characters. One often
has the feeling the author wishes the characters could be something
other than what they are, but that what they are is simply too
powerful, too real, to change. The famous story about staring at a
portrait of J.P. Morgan by Edward Steichen to 'research' his
character rings absolutely true. It's also why I like his first
novel, Welcome To Hard Times, so much. Many of the obituaries
repeated the line that the book started out as parody, but even were
that Doctorow's original intent, his sense of parody became one of
deconstruction. I look at the book as a precursor to Thomas Berger's
Little Big Man, and Berger's novel as a sort of precursor to
Doctorow's bigger novels. The film of Welcome To Hard Times
isn't great; Burt Kennedy's scripts were always better when someone
else directed them, but you can see Henry Fonda gets what the book
was about. In passing, it's odd how that great wave of post-modern
novelists: Heller, Doctorow, Vonnegut, Mailer, Berger, Barth,
Pynchon, were either ill-served or served not at all by Hollywood. I sometimes wonder if too many of Doctorow's novels end in melodrama and violence, and if those genre novels he edited at NAL did affect him, but it occurs to me that an imbalance of power in society is almost always enforced by violence, and protested by violence. Hard Times is about what happens when society is ill-equipped to deal with rampant evil; that's a classic western trope, but Doctorow's idea is that it is really endemic in our society.

I mentioned the New
Criticism; Doctorow was a fine editor at New American Library and
Dial Press. His obits mentioned the big names he edited, everything
from Mailer and Baldwin to the unlikely pairing with Ayn Rand. But Ed
Brubaker wrote today about how it was Doctorow who commissioned Jules
Feiffer's The Comic Book Heroes; the first serious study of
comics, and one that looked wryly at the America those early
super-heroes represented. I mentioned to Samira that World's Fair
might be my favourite of Doctorow's novels, and I spoke of the sense
it gives me of the time in which my parents grew up; but I realised
too that part of my pleasure in that book is the way our knowledge of
what became of the world since then burnishes our memories of 1939.
It was published in 1985, as if to say, look what we came out of,
look at how high our hopes were, and now you want to turn the clocks
back to the age of greed?

I ought to explain as well that I don't consider Waterworks his best novel, but in its style and structure it may be his best piece of prose writing. I haven't even
mentioned Billy Bathgate or
The Book Of Daniel,
either of which might head many people's list of favourite Doctorow
books, but we do mention them in the Front Row talk. I recommend his
short stories too, and especially his essays, which approach
literature and politics with the same caring that he shows his
fictional characters. He gave a graduation address at Brandeis, and
after the college edited the copy for its magazine, The Nation
published it in full. It was almost a Jeremiad, an effort to remind
the students of the world they were about to enter, and remind them
more of what they could bring to it with the learning they had just
received. Couching his words in almost literary theory, but using an
uncharacteristic vituperative approach, he talked about how we were
seeing a 'national regression to the robber baronial thinking of the
19th
century—nothing less than a deconstruction of America...as if we
were not supposed to be a just nation, but a confederacy of stupid
murderous gluttons.'

Monday, 20 July 2015

I wrote the following piece in early December for the Daily Telegraph, but for some reason it didn't appear in the paper immediately, and then it just drifted onto the spike. I was never taken with Strand's poetry, though I did enjoy his book on Hopper. But researching his obit made me appreciate some of the convergences between his life and his work. I was particularly fascinated with the idea he studied with Josef Albers, and then moved from art to poetry via Wallace Stevens: as if placing a cube in Tennessee...

Mark Strand, who has died aged 80, once said 'Poetry tries to
lead us to relocate ourselves in the self.' Relocate seemed to be the key word for Strand, who has
died aged 80. In his often spare but always elegant poetry, Strand
seems to be looking at the world, and at himself, from the outside.
'The poet provides the reader with a surrogate world through which he
reads this world,' Strand said, and at his best he achieved the
paradoxical success of bringing readers closer to the very worlds
from which he felt distanced and alienated.

That sense of
dislocation may have begun in childhood. Strand was born in
Summerside, Prince Edward Island 11 April 1934. His father's work
took the family to Halifax, Nova Scotia and Montreal before moving to
Philadelphia, where Strand started school as an outsider, speaking
English with a heavy French-Canadian accent. His father's new job
with Pepsi-Cola took the family to Cuba, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico,
but the young Mark returned each summer with his mother to St
Margaret's Bay, Nova Scotia, and memories of that seacoast and its
pine forests reverberate through his work. Still feeling less than
comfortable with English, he intended to become an artist. While
earning a BA from Antioch College (Ohio) he spent a summer an
assistant to the Mexican muralist David Siquieros, painting 'the kind
of art I learned to despise while I was working at it.' He moved to
Yale, taking a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree studying under the
painter Josef Albers. The contrast between Siquieros' social realism
and Albers' abstract focus on the language of paint itself might be
seen as template for Strand's later poetry.

While at Yale he
immersed himself in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and began to move
away from painting, placing poems in the New Yorker. A Fulbright
grant took him to Italy to study 19th century poetry; when
he returned he took a creative writing MFA at the University of Iowa,
America's most prestigious programme. In 1965 he received another
Fulbright, to teach in Brazil. His first collection, Sleeping With
One Eye Open (1964) was published by a small press in Iowa, but
in 1968 the influential editor Harry Ford at Athaneum published
Reasons For Moving, establishing Strand as a major voice. He moved to
New York and taught at Columbia, Brooklyn College, Yale and
Princeton. There he became close to Richard Howard, Charles Wright,
and Charles Simic, poets whose work incorporated elements of
surrealism, what Wright and Robert Bly labelled 'leaping poetry'. But
Strand's closest affinity might be with John Ashbery, particularly in
their shared roots in painting.

He published three
more collections whose titles are revealing: Darker (1970),
The Story Of Our Lives (1973) and The Late Hour (1978),
as well a long prose poem about immortality, The Monument (1978) and
translations of the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti and the Brazilian
Carlos Drummond de Andrade. But following publication of his
Selected Poems (1980) he gave up writing poetry for a decade.
'I didn't like what I was writing; I didn't believe in my
autobiographical poems,' he said. He moved to the University of Utah
to teach and wrote three childrens books, a collection of essays on
art, The Art Of The Real (1983) and a monograph on the artist
William Bailey (1987). That year he also received a MacArthur
Foundation 'genius grant'.

Strand marked his
return to poetry with the 1990 collection A Continuous Life, and
spent a year as America's Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress.
His new publisher was Alfred Knopf, a relationship which survived an
argument over reissuing The Monument labelled as prose. Dark
Harbor (1993) received the Bollingen Prize, and in 1994 his
monograph on Edward Hopper was a magnificent exercise in affinity, as
Strand's minute breakdown of Hopper's paintings speaks of the
waiting, the sense of time, and the position as observer of the poet
in his own poems.

His 1998 collection,
Blizzard Of One, received the Pulitzer Prize, deservedly so as
it was perhaps his finest work. It includes the long meditation
'Delerium Waltz', reflecting on life as a waltz 'we think will never
end'. He followed with the surprisingly brighter Man and Camel
(2006), New Selected Poems (2007) and this year his Collected Poems,
which was nominated for the National Book Award.

Strand died 29
November 2014, of liposarcoma, at his daughter's home in Brooklyn, to
which he was moving back after living in Madrid. His two marriages
ended in divorce, and he is survived by his partner Maricruz Bilbao,
his daughter Jessica and son Thomas.

'Poetry tries to
lead us to relocate ourselves in the self,' Mark Strand once told an
interviewer. Relocate seemed to be the key word for Strand, who has
died aged XX. In his often spare but always elegant poetry, Strand
seems to be looking from the outside, at the world and at himself.
'The poet provides the reader with a surrogate world through which he
reads this world,' he said, and at his best Strand achieved the
paradoxical success of bringing readers closer to the very worlds
from which he felt distanced and alienated.

That sense of
dislocation may have begun in childhood. Strand was born in
Summerside, Prince Edward Island 11 April 1934. His father's work
took the family to Halifax, Nova Scotia and Montreal before moving to
Philadelphia, where Strand started school as an outsider, speaking
English with a heavy French-Canadian accent. His father's new job
with Pepsi-Cola took the family to Cuba, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico,
but the young Mark returned each summer with his mother to St
Margaret's Bay, Nova Scotia, and memories of that seacoast and its
pine forests reverberate through his work. Still feeling less than
comfortable with English, he intended to become an artist. While
earning a BA from Antioch College (Ohio) he spent a summer an
assistant to the Mexican muralist David Siquieros, painting 'the kind
of art I learned to despise while I was working at it.' He moved to
Yale, taking a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree studying under the
painter Josef Albers. The contrast between Siquieros' social realism
and Albers' abstract focus on the language of paint itself might be
seen as template for Strand's later poetry.

While at Yale he
immersed himself in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and began to move
away from painting, placing poems in the New Yorker. A Fulbright
grant took him to Italy to study 19th century poetry; when
he returned he took a creative writing MFA at the University of Iowa,
America's most prestigious programme. In 1965 he received another
Fulbright, to teach in Brazil. His first collection, Sleeping With
One Eye Open (1964) was published by a small press in Iowa, but
in 1968 the influential editor Harry Ford at Athaneum published
Reasons For Moving, establishing Strand as a major voice. He moved to
New York and taught at Columbia, Brooklyn College, Yale and
Princeton. There he became close to Richard Howard, Charles Wright,
and Charles Simic, poets whose work incorporated elements of
surrealism, what Wright and Robert Bly labelled 'leaping poetry'. But
Strand's closest affinity might be with John Ashbery, particularly in
their shared roots in painting.

He published three
more collections whose titles are revealing: Darker (1970),
The Story Of Our Lives (1973) and The Late Hour (1978),
as well a long prose poem about immortality, The Monument (1978) and
translations of the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti and the Brazilian
Carlos Drummond de Andrade. But following publication of his
Selected Poems (1980) he gave up writing poetry for a decade.
'I didn't like what I was writing; I didn't believe in my
autobiographical poems,' he said. He moved to the University of Utah
to teach and wrote three childrens books, a collection of essays on
art, The Art Of The Real (1983) and a monograph on the artist
William Bailey (1987). That year he also received a MacArthur
Foundation 'genius grant'.

Strand marked his
return to poetry with the 1990 collection A Continuous Life, and
spent a year as America's Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress.
His new publisher was Alfred Knopf, a relationship which survived an
argument over reissuing The Monument labelled as prose. Dark
Harbor (1993) received the Bollingen Prize, and in 1994 his
monograph on Edward Hopper was a magnificent exercise in affinity, as
Strand's minute breakdown of Hopper's paintings speaks of the
waiting, the sense of time, and the position as observer of the poet
in his own poems.

His 1998 collection,
Blizzard Of One, received the Pulitzer Prize, deservedly so as
it was perhaps his finest work. It includes the long meditation
'Delerium Waltz', reflecting on life as a waltz 'we think will never
end'. He followed with the surprisingly brighter Man and Camel
(2006), New Selected Poems (2007) and this year his Collected Poems,
which was nominated for the National Book Award.

Strand died 29
November 2014, of liposarcoma, at his daughter's home in Brooklyn, to
which he was moving back after living in Madrid. His two marriages
ended in divorce, and he is survived by his partner Maricruz Bilbao,
his daughter Jessica and son Thomas. As he wrote in
Blizzard Of One, in the poem 'A Piece Of The Storm':

A snowflake, a
blizzard of one, weightless, entered your roomAnd made its way to
the arm of the chair where you, looking upFrom your book, saw it
the moment it landed.

Sunday, 12 July 2015

I wrote this poem in January 1977, in my hometown of Milford, Connecticut. I had left Montreal in late November '76, having completed my master's thesis in August, to avoid having to register (and pay) for another academic year. I was about to fly to London with Theresa. I can't say I ever imagined I would stay more than a few years.The title, of course, comes from the title song of Eberhard Weber's first ECM record, which was one of my favourites in the tiny flat Theresa and I shared on Lorne Avenue, and I'm sure I set my simple stereo up on my parents' porch, listened, and wrote. I may have been looking at Maya Weber's cover painting while I did. And it may have been the last thing I wrote before I arrived in England.It seems it was published in something called Chock, which may have been the same as the Chock Freesheet, in October 1979. I've probably got a copy of it in storage somewhere. But this is its first appearance since then, 35 years ago...

THE COLOURS OF CHLOE (Eberhard Weber)

Why is she sleeeping
underneath
the rain

while her cello sits
unbowed just out of
the shadows
cast aside
by a cypress, reaching down
to touch her?

She surrounds
the sunset in
her eyes.

The path of her dreams can be
followed on her face
by anyone
who drifts by
& happens to look.

As slowly as the music lures
her back to consciousness

she sees a spectrum
rising, below the horizon

the redness of angry
sky, crackling louder
than the cold blue of crying

Thursday, 2 July 2015

The Crime Writers Association awards dinner June 30th was great fun, and I was privileged to attend as one of the judges for the Short Story Dagger award. It was my first experience of judging, and it was a long slog, with shall we say, an avalanche of stories from all different published formats--including one, Neil Gaiman's 'The Case Of Death And Honey' which we had been sent and all liked but then discovered had actually been entered for the Dagger the previous year!

Eventually Laura Wilson, our chair Ayo Onatade, and I each submitted long-lists of about 12 stories. I collated them, and it quickly became obvious that our short list had created itself. Two stories appeared on all three of our lists, three on two of the lists, and in correspondence we found the Dashiell Hammett story was on one long list (mine, as it happens) but had just missed the other two. It became our sixth story, and I was grateful to see it in print in what is a very fine collection for anyone keen on the progression of detective fiction from cosy to hard-boiled.

This was our short list, with the descriptions I wrote for the CWA's releases:

Michael Connelly and
Dennis Lehane 'Red Eye' (from Face Off, published by Sphere) Connelly's Harry Bosch travels from LA on
the red eye to Boston to arrest a suspect his cold case file has
turned up, and finds Lehane's Patrick Kinsey on a stake out of the
same suspect. A tale whose understatement brings out the sharpness of
both authors' handling of character, highlighting the differences
between the two detectives in order to reveal their ultimate sameness
at the core.

Dashiell Hammett
'The Hunter' (The Hunter & Other Stories/No Exit Press): In this story a
detective who might be seen as a variation on Hammett's famous
Continental Op uses ruthless bullying to try to get a confession,
and in Hammett terms, something like the truth. This story, never
published in its time, reminds us that the essence of hard-boiled is
not cracking wise, ready violence, or blazing roscoes, but the world
view which seeks solutions for their own sake, even though solving
the crime does not necessarily bring society or its citizens (or its detectives) any
closer to satisfactory solutions for their lives.

Richard Lange
'Apocrypha' (Sweet Nothing/Mulholland Press): An ex-convict called B works as a
security guard in a jewellery store and lives in an LA flop house,
where a couple of would be players who mock him as 'McGruff the Crime
Dog' plan to rob his store. Lange reveals small bits of B's character
with off-hand remarks about his past, but it's the fatalistic view of
life, and the dark clarity with which it is drawn, that make this a
subtly powerful neo-noir story.

Richard Lange 'Sweet
Nothing' (Sweet Nothing/Mulholland Press): Richard Lange's stories of Los Angeles lie
somewhere between Charles Bukowski and George Pelecanos. In 'Sweet
Nothing' Dennis is a drug addict who's lost almost everything,
including his children, and is trying to make himself respectable
again. He shares an apartment with Troy, who weighs 450 pounds, and
works as a manager in a Subway store. One night he meets a woman
whose daughter is on life-support at a nearby hospital, hit by a car
while jaywalking. Lange's characters are simply trying to get by in a
world which sometimes seems casually antagonistic; this story is a
very brightly lit piece of LA darkness.

Stuart Neville
'Juror 8' (OxCrimes/Profile Books): If you remember 12 Angry Men you will recall
Juror 8, the older man with his own business who is the first one
persuaded by Juror 9. But, asks Neville, what if Juror 9 weren't such
a noble Henry Fonda, but more like the Fonda of Once Upon A Time In
The West, and what if the boy accused of stabbing his father to death
actually was guilty?

George Pelecanos
'The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us' (OxCrimes/Profile Books): In 1930s Washington DC,
Greek immigrant Vasili is just starting his climb to the American
Dream of success, and the one non-Greek friend he makes in his
restaurant job turns up dead. Pelecanos' story is, like much of his
writing, about the values of work and family, the struggles of little
people in a world where those values aren't always followed. Vasili
is written with such honesty the contradictions become plain, even in
his own attitudes, but at heart he is a man of honour, and this is a
dark look about what it means, or meant in those days, to be a man.

The two stories that appeared on all three long lists were 'Apocrypha'
and 'The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us'. When we met for lunch to decide
the winner, it wasn't an easy decision, hence the commendation as
runner-up for the Pelecanos, but in the end we were probably influenced
by the overall quality of Lange's collection, the quality of the
second-nominated story, 'Sweet Nothing', which is sweet nothing at all
like the winner, and indeed, just passingly a 'crime' story at all, and
the freshness of the voice.

What was fascinating to me was the similarity between our two finalist stories. Both are tales of men of low status working in jobs they feel lucky to have, whose choice of whether to act to do what they perceive as being right runs the risk of losing their job, if not creating the kinds of problems with the law and with the unlawly, that vulnerable people always face.

There was a small debate about 'The Martini Shot', the title story of George Pelecanos' first collection. I thought it was an impressive story, but there was some discussion whether it actually ran too close to novel length (which didn't bother me). In the US, awards for novellas (indeed sometimes 'novelettes') are common but I don't see that as necessary. In the event there was also some discussion about the sex scenes in this one, whether they were necessary to the story and whether they distracted from it. But it should be noted Pelecanos came close to having two stories on the short list too.

But Richard Lange was a new name to me, and having discovered his work was compensation enough for judging the award, even before the dinner. It was richly deserved, and you are advised to read him.

Wednesday, 1 July 2015

Tracy Lawless has
spent 18 months in the hole; locked up in a military prison, no
contact with the outside world. Then he's handed the personal effects
left behind by his brother, murdered nine months earlier; news the
Army kept from Lawless. Two days later, he's gone: headed back to the
city to avenge his brother's death, because that's what guys like him
are supposed to do.

The brothers grew up
in crime, and Tracy knows that if he tracks down Rick's last crew
he's likely to find the killer. So he makes a small heist of his own,
and infiltrates the crew without anyone knowing. But huge burn scars
from his soldier time in the Middle East make him easy to identify.
And the crew is preparing for a big heist, and of course there's a
woman too, who happened to be his brother Rick's girl.

The beauty of this
installment of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips Criminal series isn't so
much the noirish setting, which Phillips' dark art gets well-night
perfect, nor the relentless pace of the story, which Brubaker takes
through twists combined with the usual noirish inevitability. But
what makes it really stand out is the way it shifts times: flashbacks
to the Lawless childhoods, to Tracy's Army service, and the story of
why he's behind bars at the start, and of course the caper which he
intends to use as the stage for his revenge. They segue smoothly, but
what's impressive is the way the stories mesh together, providing
characterization and motivation that makes precise sense, even down to Lawless' names. And it connects, in the end, with previous chapters of the Criminal story.

Being noir, nothing
works out as planned, not relationships, not revenge, not the noirish
femme fatale, and of course not the heist. But the ending is perfect
noir, and there aren't many writers around, in any medium, who get it
as well as Brubaker does. This series moves from strength to
strength.